| ▲ | spaqin 7 days ago | |||||||||||||||||||
Of course cassettes were all around me when I was younger; even my first car had a cassette deck. They seemed like an old relic in that time already - with the drawbacks mentioned in the article, so it was easy to put them away seemingly forever. However, I got "back" into cassettes recently with some new releases. Grabbed a FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great, with low wow and flutter it's perfectly serviceable. There's one thing that made it stand out and felt like we missed something that's now become a lost art - absolutely no delay between pressing play and music playing. No buffering from a streaming service, no megabytes pushed into RAM, no decoding, no FIFOs being filled before the signal exiting through a DAC. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | itintheory 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||
> FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great The sad part is that the quality of modern cassette players is actually decidedly worse than their vintage counterparts. There's essentially only one company producing the actual mechanism (Tanashin) and they're cheaply made of low quality materials (plastic flywheels etc.). That's the main reason that the vintage machines are still fetching higher prices. Also I don't think any modern machines have Dolby B-C noise reduction, HX Pro, automatic track seek/skip, and whatever other fancy features you could find in the likes of a high end Sony or Nakamichi deck. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | albert_e 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||||||||||||||
I agree And also .. there is absolutely no chance that you might unexpectedly hear an ad instead of a song. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | JKCalhoun 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||||||||||||||
I miss driving down the freeway, occasionally seeing the shoulders strewn with cassette tape… Actually, I don't miss that at all. | ||||||||||||||||||||